Issues with removing cygwin installed TTF font files

[Ken Brown]

On 9/13/2020 10:16 AM, Michael Soegtrop wrote:
> Dear Cygwin Team and Users,
> 
> since a few months I have issues deleting cygwin installations. In some cases 
> randomly the /usr/share/fonts/microsoft folder and the TTF files in it remain. 
> According to DOS dir the folder contains junctions to TTF files - not sure how 
> this is possible - afaik a junction is for folders. But what I get is this:
> 
> C:\ci\cygwin64_21081_16603\usr\share\fonts\microsoft>dir
>   Volume in drive C is SYSTEM
>   Volume Serial Number is 70C2-07FA
> 
>   Directory of C:\ci\cygwin64_21081_16603\usr\share\fonts\test
> 
> 02/07/2020  13:52    <DIR>          .
> 02/07/2020  13:52    <DIR>          ..
> 01/07/2020  11:47    <JUNCTION>     ahronbd.ttf [...]
> 01/07/2020  11:47    <JUNCTION>     andlso.ttf [...]
> 01/07/2020  11:47    <JUNCTION>     angsa.ttf [...]
> 01/07/2020  11:47    <JUNCTION>     angsab.ttf [...]
> 01/07/2020  11:47    <JUNCTION>     angsai.ttf [...]
> 01/07/2020  11:47    <JUNCTION>     angsau.ttf [...]
> 01/07/2020  11:47    <JUNCTION>     angsaub.ttf [...]
> 01/07/2020  11:47    <JUNCTION>     angsaui.ttf [...]
> 01/07/2020  11:47    <JUNCTION>     angsauz.ttf [...]
> :
> 
> Interesting is that this does not happen always. I am working on a open source 
> project and our CI installs and removes cygwin about 100 times a day. I see this 
> issue about 20 times per month - distributed over all of our CI runners. Maybe 
> Windows gives the TTF file some special handling every now and again, but I 
> checked the registry and there is nothing pointing to this cygwin folder, except 
> the cygwin installation registry.
> 
> I couldn't find any method to remove these files. I made sure I have delete 
> rights and that nobody has a lock on these files, but still whatever I tried 
> (Explorer, cygwin admin console, DOS admin console, reboot a few times, chkdsk, 
> google) failed.
> 
> If you have an idea that could help me to delete these files reliably and/or 
> avoid this situation, it would help me a lot!

/usr/share/fonts/microsoft contains symlinks to TTF files:

$ ls -al /usr/share/fonts/microsoft/
total 158
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 kbrown-admin None  0 2019-07-31 11:36 ./
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 kbrown-admin None  0 2018-09-30 17:18 ../
-rw-r--r--  1 kbrown-admin None 36 2019-07-31 11:36 .uuid
lrwxrwxrwx  1 kbrown-admin None 26 2018-09-28 15:25 arial.ttf -> 
/c/Windows/Fonts/arial.ttf
lrwxrwxrwx  1 kbrown-admin None 28 2018-09-28 15:25 arialbd.ttf -> 
/c/Windows/Fonts/arialbd.ttf
lrwxrwxrwx  1 kbrown-admin None 28 2018-09-28 15:25 arialbi.ttf -> 
/c/Windows/Fonts/arialbi.ttf
[...]

What Cygwin symlinks look like to Windows tools depends on the filesystem, the 
value of the CYGWIN environment variable, and other factors.  See

   https://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#pathnames-symlinks

Ken